#FinancialFitness2018 continues this week with one of the most important subjects yet. We’ve been going through each bucket in the Bucket Strategy, and we’ve now arrived at the last one; the retirement bucket.

While the first two buckets are also very important, it is the retirement bucket that is the most misunderstood, and consequently avoided. There is so much anxiety in this country surrounding retirement, and how best to plan for it. It definitely doesn’t need to be this way!

Over the last couple years, as I’ve been starting my business and getting it off the ground, I haven’t had a lot of extra money to put towards retirement. However, as a Financial Advisor, I know better than anyone how important it is to do. As part of my #FinancialFitness2018 journey, I am going to start.

What is the first step to figuring out this retirement bucket? Well, it turns out we’ve already taken that. By creating the budget, we know how much money we have left over at the end of month. Using the Bucket Strategy, we know we have to allocate a percentage of that amount into each bucket. To determine how much we want to put into our retirement bucket, we need to create a financial plan.

When creating financial plans for clients, they normally surround a retirement goal. For most people, that is the end game. While financial plans are extremely complex, the four biggest variables are the following:

1) How much money do you already have saved for retirement?

2) How much money are you currently saving into a retirement account?

3) At what age do you want to retire?

4) How much money do you want to spend in retirement?

While there are definitely more things that we take into consideration when creating a retirement plan (pensions, social security, life insurance, etc.), those are the variables that most often come into play.

Tomorrow I am going to talk more about item 1, how much money I already have saved. This is super important, and it’s something I’ve been putting off dealing with for a quite a while! I am seriously excited about this one.